Chapter Five: A Fool’s Taxi

She said yes when he asked her to marry him, thinking that she could create for him a partner who would give him a real role model of what a woman should be.  She never had a bruise that she didn’t agree to beforehand.  That’s how it was.  A bargain.  A pound of flesh for every sin.  She couldn’t remember, before long, what it was like to be loved by someone without the prescribed dose of control or the moment of pain.   No one would have ever guessed the darkness that lived under his sheets and no one would have known that she didn’t go to bed in fear, that she grew to think that is how love tasted.  She never, for a moment, considered it to be strange.

Even afterwards, after she had broken the engagement, she never really admitted to herself that things between them had been abnormal.  She spoke of him only with love.  She moved to University and filled her room mate’s heads with stories of her summer love and her tragic breakup, sliding past the nights spent screaming at one another, the anguish in the decision he had forced her to make, and the subsequent months of arguments they had about who loved who more.  She placed him deep inside her breast-bone and only let the beautiful, light parts of him to leak out. It was a perfect ruse.  In time she even forgot about the things that tore them apart and the danger that peaked out from his eyes. It was easy, when surrounded by strangers, to make him out to be a perfect boyfriend, separated by the fate of mismatched years.  So easy that she almost believed it herself.

When he called her during her junior year, three long years parted, and asked to see her, the only thing in her heart was excitement at the prospect of reacquainting herself with a long ago friend- someone she had known inside and out.  Dinner together in an expensive restaurant, a chance to catch up on each others lives, and a drink at the bar- nothing in the night could have possibly indicated that she’d made an error in judgment.  She didn’t even think twice about his invitation back to his room to chat more, rent a movie, talk about old times.  His eyes were radiant with light and his smile was genuine, the paradigm of who she remembered him to be.

Afterwards she couldn’t remember it all. It existed for her in moments, smells, certain pressures against her body.   She could picture his dark hair, glistening and wet and sticking to his cheeks in little clumps and his eyes, a dark and inky black water, on fire with jealousy and rage. She could feel his hands, so strong she could barely hold onto her footing at he pulled her up from the table and caught her, breathless around the waist. 
    “I love you!” He’d shouted, and his voice was full of bile, spitting each letter across the terror in her eyes as if he had said ‘hate’ rather than ‘love’. Barely breathing, her legs buckled as he carried her to the hotel room’s only chair and shoved her down into it. 
    “I love you!” He’d spat again as he landed on his knees in front of the chair, pushing his wet head into her lap, and she felt the liquid heat of his tears spewing over her bare legs, his choking sobs, his hands grabbing and squeezing her ankles. When she put a hand in his wet hair, a little shaky, she felt one of his grab her wrist to hold it there, and she couldn’t make out everything he was saying as he cried in her lap. The cries choked off into silence but his grip stayed firm, and pulling her down to the floor he pressed the weight of his body even more firmly into her, pinioning her against the chair leg and his knees as the anger and control rose in a wave over his eyes.  She remembered the way those emotions seemed to fade, his hands sliding against her face, pushing her throat until she choked for breath, how what replaced the anger and control was blank, smooth, devoid of life, somewhere right beyond her reach.

She had called out for him to stop though he didn’t seem to hear her.  She had struggled against his hands that pulled off her skirt, ripped her nylons, and loosened his pants. He was robotic, unseeing .  Pushing him away was useless in her position on the floor, his grip was firm and she felt, when he pushed himself inside her, a gruesome feeling of familiarity, as if a long lost friend had come home, only was somehow changed to the most vile, cruel, demon from the depths of hell.  Her memories faded still more around the act, and she remembered less- his whisper against her ear, telling her how hideous she was, how no one would ever love her other than him, how she was lucky that someone like him would even stand to look at her ugly face. He repeated “I love you” over and over like a mantra between the grunts and insults and the cruel, hard laugh.  She heard what he meant even if he didn’t say it- she felt it in the way his body consumed her, took from her, as easy as a breath, the most intimate part of herself.  Afterwards, before she could form words like ‘hate’ and ‘rape’, she had followed him to the bed, and sat up beside him while he drifted to sleep. He was like a grotesque child exhausted from a tantrum, but the tantrum was her world unraveling.  When she touched his hair, which was now dried and tangled sweat, she didn’t feel anything at all.  She didn’t feel anything when she gathered her clothes from the floor.  She didn’t feel anything when she made her way back to her dorm room, by taxi, with the sun just yet to crack it’s bloody red greeting across the sky.

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